Ethical Dilemma: Client Consent Does Not Determine Reasonableness of Fees

Nancy B. Rapoport | William S. Boyd School of Law

Nancy B. Rapoport is a UNLV Distinguished Professor, the Garman Turner Gordon Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an Affiliate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Lee Business School at UNLV. After receiving her B.A., summa cum laude, from Rice University in 1982 and her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1985, she clerked for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed III on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then practiced law (primarily bankruptcy law) with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco from 1986-1991. She started her academic career at The Ohio State University College of Law, served in three deanships, one stint as Acting Provost (UNLV), one stint as Acting CFO (also UNLV), and one stint as Special Counsel to the President of UNLV. In 2022, UNLV’s Alumni Association named her the Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year. Boyd law students have honored her three times: she tied (with Professor Jean Sternlight) for “Faculty Member of the Year” in 2024; she was named “Faculty Member of the Year” (and faculty commencement speaker) in 2021; and she was named “Dean of the Year” by Boyd law students in 2013.

Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, law firm behavior, artificial intelligence and the law, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. She has served as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (the Mob Museum) and currently serves as a Trustee of Claremont Graduate University and the Chair of its Audit and Risk Management Committee. She is also a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. In 2017, she received the Commercial Law League of America’s Lawrence P. King Award for Excellence in Bankruptcy, and in 2018, she was one of the recipients of the NAACP Legacy Builder Awards (Las Vegas Branch #1111). She has served as the fee examiner or as chair of the fee review committee in such large bankruptcy cases as Zetta Jet, Toys R Us, Caesars, Station Casinos, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Mirant. She served as the President of UNLV’s Chapter 100 of Phi Kappa Phi from 2024-2025.

Robert J. Keach | Verrill Dana LLP

Bob is an experienced, widely respected bankruptcy practitioner practicing in the area of bankruptcy, reorganization, and workouts.

Bob’s practice focuses on the representation of various parties in workouts and bankruptcy cases, including debtors, creditors, creditors’ committees, lessors and third parties acquiring troubled companies and/or their assets. Bob has appeared before the bankruptcy courts in the Districts of New Jersey, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, the Northern District of California, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, among others.

Bob regularly appears as a panelist on national bankruptcy, lender liability and creditors’ rights programs, and is the author of several articles on bankruptcy and creditors’ rights appearing in the ABI Law Review, Commercial Law Journal and ABI Journal, among other publications. Bob is admitted to practice in both state and federal courts in Maine and Massachusetts, as well as the First, Second, Seventh and Eighth Circuit Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. As detailed below, Bob has served as a court-appointed fee examiner and has been designated an expert witness on fee-related matters in several cases. Bob has also served as a chapter 11 trustee and has represented court-appointed receivers in matters before state courts, including the Delaware Chancery Court.

Bob is an Adjunct Professor (Cross-Border Insolvency; Business Bankruptcy) at Boston College Law School.

Joseph Tiano | Legal Decoder

After practicing law for nearly 20 years, Joe founded Legal Decoder because he saw that clients lacked the analytic tools and data to effectively price and manage the cost of legal services delivered by outside counsel. Together with Chris Miller, his Co-Founder, Joe set out to build an intelligent, data driven technology company that would revolutionize the way that legal services from outside counsel are priced and economically evaluated.

Previously, Joe was a Partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP and Thelen LLP where he grew and managed all aspects of a multimillion-dollar cross-border finance practice. Entrepreneurship runs through Joe’s veins since his early days as a venture capital lawyer representing transformative technology companies, like Blackboard Inc., and many of the outgrowths of Blackboard (WeddingWire, Presidium, Starfish Retention Solutions and others). Joe has been a prolific writer publishing numerous articles on substantive legal issues and the legal industry in general.

Joe graduated from Georgetown University in 1992 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration and received his J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1995. Joe lives in Falls Church, Virginia with his wife, Meredith, and their two boys, Gabriel and John-Paul.

I. Client consent vs. court oversight | 11:30am – 12:00pm

• Why client approval of fees is not determinative in bankruptcy matters, given that compensation is drawn from the estate and requires judicial review for reasonableness

II. Structural barriers to fee challenges | 12:00pm – 12:30pm 

• The dynamics that discourage estate-paid professionals from objecting to each other’s fee applications, and how this impacts the integrity of the fee review process

Break | 12:30pm – 12:40pm

III. Enhancing judicial review with data and expertise | 12:40pm – 1:10pm

• The role of fee examiners and the use of data-driven analysis in supporting courts’ evaluation of whether requested fees are reasonable and consistent with statutory requirements (ABA Model Rule 1.5)